


You Don't have to Choose

by Gypsiewitch



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy, Sunshine - Robin McKinley
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Creature Fic, Eventual Smut, F/M, I wanted to write Reylo and ended up re-writing Sunshine with Star Wars characters, Magic, Past Attempted Rape/Non-Con, Past Child Abuse, Star Wars characters with angst, alternate universe - our world but not our world, author doesn't know what she's doing, so it's different from Sunshine too
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-23
Updated: 2019-04-23
Packaged: 2020-01-24 10:42:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18569791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gypsiewitch/pseuds/Gypsiewitch
Summary: Usually Rey loved all the noise that came with everyone, once Jakku’s opened and again on Thursdays when they all trooped up to the flat.  Often it was friends arguing over which movie to watch; Rose and Paige loved re-watching the same old movies over and over, while Chewie only wanted to watch army movies, and Amilyn always picked comedies.  Or, arguing over what game to play, Jess loved gin rummy but Lando & Poe always insisted on playing poker, while Finn refused to play anything but euchre, but that meant teams and not everyone could play every game.  All the noise meant everyone was together, and safe, and while they were arguing, they were happy, and she was home.  It was only very occasionally that it was too much.





	You Don't have to Choose

**Author's Note:**

> This started as an AU-Reylo and turned into a Sunshine retelling. I regret nothing. Well, mostly nothing.

The little corner bakery doesn’t look like much from the outside. Broken bricks pepper the façade; rusted metal overhang above the front door; the paint from the name ‘Jakku’s’ is starting to peel in several places, and you can only see most of the opening hours, _“am – 3pm, tues… to ...aturday,”_ though everyone in town knows when it’s open. ‘Jakku’s’ has been the best bakery/lunch stop worth eating at for years, and if you want sweets, it’s the only one you visit.  The regulars stop in often for their custom tarts, legendary pies, cakes, killer dips (the sweet kind that you dip fruit or cookies or marshmallows in, highly recommended), but everyone always stops by when Rey makes her cinnamon rolls. Unfortunately it’s not very often because Poe, the owner, likes to keep a random rotation of the best selling dishes; keeps the regulars on their toes and the best dishes in hot demand, he says.  Rey doesn’t really care much, as long as he keeps her employed, she can bake as much as she wants and, more importantly, eat as much as she wants from what she makes. 

 

This is maybe the greatest miracle of her life at the bakery.  She gets to do honest work, doing something she loves, with people she loves that also love her, _and_ , she never goes hungry. Not anymore.  But Rey doesn’t think about that; not since Finn took her in five years ago.  He’s like family now and Rey doesn’t know what would have happened if he hadn’t ran into her that day.  And Finn was so great; he never forced her to spill her story, or explain why she was alone after dark in the district; because it was against orders for anyone to be alone in the district after dark, let alone how suspicious it was to be in the district to begin with, dark or otherwise.  This was really for everyone’s own protection because the Others usually roamed at night, and you could get arrested just on suspicion of being an Other if you were caught out at night, heaven forbid you were actually caught in the company of Others, if the Order troops caught you first.  And the Order catching you was almost as bad as if the Others had you.  At least, that’s what the rumors said.   _Officially,_ the _‘First Order’_ was there to protect society.  Their slogan, “Order, Stability, Progress,” is really just a guise for “follow our rules, live how we say, and you’ll be allowed to go on without issue.”  Gee, thanks big brother, glad to know you’re watching out for everyone.  But there are good Order guys; they’re not all bad. Some actually want to help society, and protect those who can’t protect themselves.  And you mostly have to go on what the Order says because no one really knows what happens if the Others were to get you.  Because that was the thing; no one the Others took ever came back. They just disappeared.  And you only ever heard rumors, and the family wasn’t allowed to speak publically about what happened.  The Order, _officially,_ said that they were actually secret agents who were missing-in-action; but really everyone knew they were teachers, medics, chefs, neighbors, and sometimes, horribly, kids, who went missing and really never had a thing to do with the Order, _officially_.  Which of course makes you not want to trust the Order. Being told, ‘your English lit teacher is being relocated on a secret mission for the Order, don’t ask questions,” is pretty hard to swallow when she was pushing the high end of her sixties and you knew she had hip surgery a year or two ago and still had a hard time walking. The rumors were bad though, and the Others were certainly not known for kindness.  Occasionally corpses were found, and no matter how hard the Order worked to cover things up, pictures got out, and the bodies usually were not recognizable except that they still had the vague shape of human beings, but utterly decimated.  You could find them, the pictures, still on the dark web, but mostly the Order shut down those sites as soon as possible.  But people still found them.  And the rumors still went around.

 

Rey never pried into what Finn was doing that night either.  She simply accepted his friendly offer of a ride, a warm meal, and someplace warm to stay until sunrise if she needed it.  His smile had been genuine, and she trusted her gut implicitly; Finn was someone you could trust; Finn was good people.  He had an air of understanding different from most people; plus he was clearly human and not Other, which was a win for the trusting Finn team.  And she had been scared, and so alone, so tired of running, and mostly tired of not having anyone to trust.  So she had followed him back to his flat, right above “Jakku’s,” that he shared with Poe, scarfed down the leftover shepherds pie they had warmed up for her, and promptly curled up with their cat BB8 and fell asleep in the chair in the corner.  Rey wondered that Poe didn’t question Finn bringing home a stray, but he was so welcoming and cheery that Rey instantly felt like she could trust him too, though she thoroughly questioned his eagerness to feed anyone and everyone.  She would never have trusted a stray or given away food, but then she came from a dark place where food was hard to come by, people couldn’t trust each other, and people were sometimes not people but really Others, and really the only one you could rely on was yourself.  But the next day Poe had shown her the section in the back of the flat that he said was now hers, kind of small but with a bed, and desk with a cushy chair like the one in the living room, and extra blankets and pillows on the bed, and a picture of a cottage by a lake that used to belong to Poe’s grandparents hanging on one wall.  It had a separate entrance with stairs down the back, it’s own bathroom, and three large windows overlooking the street that led into the district; but was mostly a nice view during the day because you could see the buildings of old town, and she could keep the curtains drawn at night.  Rey couldn’t understand why they would offer it to her when they hardly knew her, and weren’t they using it for something, but he had simply said “it’s yours if you want it.  Don’t you feel like it should be yours?  It feels that way to us.”  And Rey didn’t cry, and Poe only lightly patted her on the back, while Finn hovered awkwardly in the doorway telling Rey she could stay as long as she liked, but they had to head down to the bakery if she wanted to come get some breakfast. 

 

In the bakery is where she earned her place there and really felt like she could stay and that it wasn’t charity.  Poe and Finn were trying to make Brack, traditional sweet bread, but were completely butchering the recipe and clearly had no clue how to make it, when Rey offered.  They both just looked at her, like maybe she _was_ an Other, but she reassured them that she knew how to make it because Maz, her first family, (at least the first person that felt like family and acted like she wanted Rey around and that Rey wasn’t a problem to be thrown away), had made it the old way, from scratch, and Rey had thought everything Maz did was wonderful so she had memorized her every movement, including the ingredients.  That’s when Poe & Finn learned that Rey was a genius in the kitchen, with Rey covered in flour, finally looking comfortable and calm, and the two of them watching her surreptitiously from the grill where they had eggs and sausages going.  One taste of the bread and Poe had actually groaned out loud making Rey blush, and Finn had declared that Rey was good people, which made Rey smile.  Good people was what Maz had always called people she trusted, and Rey still said it about those rare few she deemed trustworthy, so she took it as a sign that her gut was right about Finn & Poe.  Poe immediately offered her a job, if she wanted to stay, though he promised the room was hers whether or not she took it, and since Rey had no reason not to take the job, she took it. 

 

That was five years ago. Five years, four months, and three days ago.  Not that Rey keeps track, but old habits die hard, and she used to always keep track of how long she stayed at any place, since they changed so often.  But she doesn’t think about that anymore.  She has friends here, amazing people; Finn & Poe, her family; Amilyn, who does the books; Rose and her sister Paige, who both waitress and work the counter; Jess, who fills in as waitress alternating days off with Rose & Paige; and Snap, who used to do the baking but now busses tables and washes the dishes.  Rey felt horrible about Snap at first, like she had pushed him out of a job somehow, but he assured her that he would take any excuse not to have to get up and into work so early in the morning, and everyone else assured her that if she had tasted his attempt at cinnamon roles she would realize what a mercy she was giving by putting him out of his misery. 

 

A lot of the regulars at Jakku’s are pretty much family too.  Threepio, the older gentleman who never skips a cinnamon role, and takes his daily coffee with his paper in the back booth; Chewie, who’s real name was something none of them could remember any longer, but he sat at the counter telling old war stories to anyone who would listen; and Lando, who runs the grocery down the road, delivers their fruits and vegetables, and always ends up staying after his daily delivery for whatever Rey’s first creation out of the oven is.  Rey loves them all, and can’t imagine her life without them anymore, even though they spend several hours together a day, and have a standing date every Thursday night at the flat for movies, or karaoke, or cards.  Most weeks, Rey makes death by chocolate cake before leaving the bakery, and Poe cooks up pizza or tacos because he can’t not feed people.  At first, when it was just the three of them, Poe & Rey would argue over who was going to cook; Rey because she still felt like she was fighting for a right to stay, and Poe because feeding people was second nature, and really more of a compulsion.  The compromise only happened when Poe first tasted Rey’s peanut butter cookies, she tasted his pizza, and they each agreed to do what they were best at.  After a few months with Rey in the bakery, Rose & Paige started coming to Thursday nights too, mostly to get the free food, and once word spread, more and more of their work family became Thursday night home family too. 

 

Usually Rey loved all the noise that came with everyone, once Jakku’s opened and again on Thursdays when they all trooped up to the flat.  Often it was friends arguing over which movie to watch; Rose and Paige loved re-watching the same old movies over and over, while Chewie only wanted to watch army movies, and Amilyn always picked comedies.  Or, arguing over what game to play, Jess loved gin rummy but Lando & Poe always insisted on playing poker, while Finn refused to play anything but euchre, but that meant teams and not everyone could play every game. All the noise meant everyone was together, and safe, and while they were arguing, they were happy, and she was home. It was only very occasionally that it was too much. 

 

That Thursday had started out mostly normal, and looking back she wasn’t sure she wouldn’t do everything the same way.  She had a mild headache when she woke, but really when your day starts at 4 am so that you can make sure the bread and cookies, and whatever other random deserts Poe had put on the menu for the day were ready by opening, headaches weren’t that uncommon.  Sleep deprivation was a common occurrence when you chose to live your life baking for the masses, and headaches were a common occurrence if you had sleep deprivation. Rey was usually the first one down to the bakery in the mornings, since Poe didn’t need to start the grills until after 5, and she truly liked the brief time alone in her part of the bakery. The silence of pre-dawn was always the best, calm, serene, and it usually didn’t press around you the same as the silence of midnight or one am, which tended to be when you hoped you weren’t seeing shadows move in ways shadows weren’t supposed to move.  She was making her cinnamon rolls that morning, along with apple tarts, a cherry cobbler, and finally working into her sourdough bread that’d she’d had rising for the last 12 hours when Poe & Finn arrived. 

 

It was busier than normal too, a busload of tourists on their way through old town stopped in for lunch, bursting Jakku’s at the seams.  It was lucky the weather had finally turned, so the back was open for outdoor seating and every small table and booth was filled.  When spring officially arrived every one wanted the outside seats at Jakku’s.  The back looked out over old town and into the district, and though no one was supposed to, everyone liked to look that way and speculate about the Others. Really, their part of old town hadn’t had any activity in years, and even their local Order troops were pretty friendly and relaxed about the whole thing, hanging out at Jakku’s like regulars and not treating everyone like a suspect.  And their gardens surrounding the back were award winning, so if nothing else the flowers and plants were pleasant to be around.

 

Most of the tour bus companies work well with Poe, and they know to give advance notice when they’re bringing a big group by after that one time they didn’t and Amilyn called the main office and read them the riot act, which no one takes well; but that day they had a new driver starting and several of the riders convinced him it that it should be fine to swing in unannounced because restaurants should be able to handle random rush crowds at anytime.  Really he’s lucky it was Amilyn’s day off, because no one survives long on the receiving end of one of her rants.  If they had known they were coming they could have made sure there was extra food ready, but as it was they ran out of almost every cookie, tart, cinnamon roll, sandwich, and salad they had, even with Rey frantically making second batches of everything, and throwing together some quick dips for fruit, that could also double as tartlet filling.  Finn ran over to the store for more sandwich stuff, and had Rey start a third pot of stew when she realized her fifth cup of coffee wasn’t helping her headache any.  Rey headed out around 1 usually, but they were so slammed she stayed to help with the tables, and didn’t make it back upstairs until well after 3.  Finn came up sometime after 4, and let her know they were still cleaning up where some of the tourist’s kids had made a mess in the gardens surrounding the back patio of the building.  The plan for that night was cards, and most everyone wandered up right after Jakku’s closed.  Jess and Snap showed up shortly after Finn, followed quickly by the rest of the group with Poe bringing up the rear.  As soon as Amilyn arrived and started pitching for karaoke over cards, and Chewie was enthusiastically singing Led Zeppelin songs to ‘warm his voice up’, Rey felt her headache mount to epic proportions.  Finn recognized the look on her face, and offered her his car to get out for a bit.  They’d been so busy all day that Poe had already ordered Chinese take-out for everyone because even he was done, and Finn could tell from the look on her face that she was at the end of her rope.

 

She readily agreed and figured she’d just take a little drive, the after-noon was nice, sunny and breezy, and really she wouldn’t go far.  Once she started driving and the road was pretty quiet and empty, it occurred to her it might be nice to drive out to the lake.  Poe’s grandparents had left him their house, and every summer since she had moved in they closed up the shop for a week, packed up BB8, all their cooking supplies and took off for sun and relaxation.  It really was a pretty safe place to visit, with no off-limit spots like in the district, which really any normal person can feel a few miles away, so you know to stay away, even without the Order’s warnings, and Poe had given her leave to go out that way any time she liked.  Since Rey didn’t have a car of her own, as she lived above her work there really was no need, she only rarely had been out this way by herself.  Every now and then she got the impression that Finn & Poe wanted some alone time, and really felt like she was a burden on their relationship, so sometimes she’d borrow Finn’s car and head out to the lake on her days off.  Finn insisted they were fine, and loved having her with them, but she didn’t like hearing them through the walls of the flat all the time, and knew that they tried to be quiet so as not to embarrass her, so she insisted she’d give them a ‘couples’ weekend so they could be as loud as they liked. 

 

The house on the lake wasn’t anything majestic, but was perfect for a getaway.  It had a wrap around porch that circled the house, two stories, three bedrooms and more windows than made sense, but which Rey loved. On their summer trips there she’d curl up in the sunlight in the back room overlooking the lake and read for hours, while Poe & Finn swam and fooled around by the dock.  Once she got to the house, she walked out to the lake for a bit, but after dipping her feet in and finding the water was still too cold, she wandered back to the porch to sit and relax before heading back.  The breeze off the water was nice and cool, and she sat listening to the crickets chirp feeling all the stress from the day start to melt away.  Her headache was finally edging out and she really wasn’t sure why today had been too much to begin with.  The first fireflies were lighting up the trees and she finally felt some peace creep in.

 

She never heard them coming.  But you don’t, when they’re vampires.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! I'd love to hear constructive comments or thoughts! <3 
> 
> If you haven't read Sunshine by Robin McKinley, I highly recommend it. She is one of my most favorite authors, and while I know she doesn't really approve of fan fiction, I just couldn't help myself. This is mostly a retelling of that novel, but will be much shorter and will eventually have the smut Sunshine never really gives us. Anyway, I hope you enjoy!


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